Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.

Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

I don't know the difference between what I want and what I'm trained to want.

Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.

I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.

There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.

Some little part of themselves for someone in the future to discover. Maybe a thought. We were here. We built this. A reminder.

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

As a culture, we believe that if we kill something, we've killed the issue. That's why so many books end with death, why so many plays end with death, because it's full resolution. I'm always curious to know what happens after Romeo and Juliet die. In a way, that's the beginning of the story. Maybe beyond the story is even better.

If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.

There's an old saying: 'No piece of writing is ever finished, it's just abandoned.' But my own rule is: No piece of work is done until you want to kill everyone involved in the publishing process, especially yourself.

This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea that I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.

We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.

Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing . . .

The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our heads says, "I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew." Meaning: I may be me- but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU.

Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.

She drank a glass of wine and looked for something new to ruin with her lack of talent.

A good story should change the way you see the world.

you ever been trapped in a world where you're everyone's worst nightmare?

No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

The bad news is we don't have any control. The good news is we can't make any mistakes.

We kind of deny the stages of life.

Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.

There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.

The problem in this case was you can't be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker.

Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated.

Does it hurt very much to die? Well, sweetheart, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.

There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God. If you're male and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God? What you end up doing is you spend your life searching for a father and God. What you have to consider is the possibility that God doesn't like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen.

I told him to buy land, my mum says, they’re not making it anymore.

When I see people talking on the internet about me or my work it's almost always more a description of themselves and so I never really think of myself as anything more than just who I always was.

Skin, bones, blood and organs transplant from person to person. Even what’s inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you’d die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited. Whatever you’re thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they’re doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.

You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it.

Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.

This is passive-aggression in action.

I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful.

Scratch any fortune and you'll find blood only a generation or two back...child labor in mines or mills...Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night? You see how fast reality fades away?

Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Sex pretty much cures everything.

I tiger can smile A snake will say it loves you Lies make us evil

I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

Nothing feels as awful as pouring your heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is actually vastly stupid and you've just professed your most secret secrets to some goon who's wearing one brown sock and one blue sock.

Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.